Awards: Lauded at Last

Like the Nobel medicine prizes awarded in
October, the chemistry and physics awards announced last week were both
belated and well deserved. But they were given for achievement so
esoteric that few laymen could even begin to understand it. Said a
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences spokesman in announcing the prizes:
"It would be almost impossible to explain the works of these two
scientists to people other than scientists."

The chemistry prize went to University of Chicago Chemical Physicist
Robert Mulliken, 70, for his molecular orbital theory, first published
in 1928. With that theory Mulliken forever destroyed an established
scientific...